Description

Here is the actual vinyl LP that is on sale:

(picture sleeve)

 (vinyl):

Faith Hope Love is an album by Progressive rock band Kings X.
The album was listed at #52 in the book, CCM Presents: The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music.

Track listing:
“We Are Finding Who We Are” 4:39
“Its Love” 4:34
“I’ll Never Get Tired of You” 3:46 Faith Hope Love is more earthbound than its predecessors, though King’s X still pirouette off into the skies when the mood takes them, as they do here.

“Fine Art of Friendship” 4:21
“Mr. Wilson” 3:39
“Moanjam” 6:05
“Six Broken Soldiers” 3:32  “Six Broken Soldiers” was the first Kings X song to feature Jerry Gaskill on lead vocals.
“I Can’t Help It” 3:53
“Talk to You” 4:36
“Everywhere I Go” 3:53
“We Were Born to Be Loved” 4:52
“Faith Hope Love” 9:23
“Legal Kill” 4:42
All songs written by Pinnick, Tabor & Gaskill.

Doug Pinnick – bass/vocals
Ty Tabor – guitar/vocals
Jerry Gaskill – drums/vocals

Kings X – Its Love

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Adored by the press, rock royalty and fans across the board, King’s X really should have been the next very big thing. Instead they remain the greatest ever cult band

Jerry Gaskill [Kings X drummer ] has a vivid memory of being chased down the street by Layne Staley of Alice In Chains. Gaskill’s band, the Texan trio King’s X, had rolled into Seattle on the tour to promote their debut album, 1988’s Out Of The Silent Planet. Many of the leading players in the city’s nascent grunge scene had turned out to see them, including members of Soundgarden and Mother Love Bone as well as Alice In Chains.

It was after the show that Gaskill found himself accosted by Staley. The Kings’s X drummer was on his way to get some food when he heard footsteps hammering behind him.

“I see this guy hurtling down the street towards me, going: ‘Jerry! Jerry! I love your band, man!’” remembers Gaskill, as softly spoken and modest a man as you could ever hope to meet. “It was Layne. For some reason they all were really supportive of us up there. We became friends with a lot of those guys.”

Staley wasn’t the only superstar besotted with King’s X. In the early 90s, at the height of his own band’s success, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament declared on MTV that “King’s X invented grunge”. Ament’s rationale was sound. In the era of Guns N’ Roses and Poison, King’s X, with their drop-D guitar tunings, sounded like nothing else around. But even if they had sparked off that movement – which is debatable anyway – that doesn’t tell the whole story. They also drew on a deep well of influences that ran from The Beatles (their effortless melodicism and immaculate harmonies) to Motörhead (the metallic ring of frontman Dug – formerly Doug – Pinnick’s bass sound was the heaviest thing this side of Lemmy) and even Joshua Tree-era U2 (their songs possessed an enigmatic, uplifting, spiritual edge).

The British music press went into meltdown. Out of nowhere, this trio of unlikely looking men in their greatcoats and military jackets became magazine cover stars. The band’s first three albums – Out Of The Silent Planet, 1989’s Gretchen Goes To Nebraska and 1991’s Faith, Hope, Love – were each individually hailed as the future of rock.

Kings X is an American hard rock band that combines progressive metal, funk and soul with vocal arrangements influenced by gospel, blues, and British Invasion pop groups. The bands lyrics are largely based on the members’ struggles with religion and self-acceptance.
Since being signed to Megaforce Records in 1987, Kings X has released twelve studio albums, one official live album, and several independent releases. The band is currently recording for the Inside Out Music label, and continues to tour with each new release. Early in their major label career, they had many opening slots on arena tours, but lately the band, for the most part, headline their own shows playing mostly clubs and smaller venues.
Each member of the group has recorded solo albums and has made numerous guest appearances on other artists’ albums and compilation projects. Doug Pinnick and Ty Tabor also have albums released with side bands that they participate in.
Despite the band members having varying degrees of Christian beliefs through the years and the group having had early dealings in the Contemporary Christian market, the members of Kings X have never considered themselves a “Christian” band. However, some of their early lyrical themes (especially the first three albums) have led to some people labelling the group as such, which all three members strongly oppose.

Kings X was ranked #83 on VH1s 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.

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An essential album for any music collection. – 99%
After a near-perfect record in Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, Kings X entered the 90s as the band to beat with their third album (and second masterpiece) faith hope love by Kings X. Rather than just safely following the formula they’d been praised for, the band went ahead and cranked out an hour-long epic that remains one of the greatest hard/prog/metal/rock/whatever albums in history. It might just be their career best.

The biggest difference here is cohesion- for the first time, the band had crafted an album that worked as a complete whole. You don’t want to be putting this on “shuffle,” as these aren’t just a bunch of singles strung together, even though songs like Its Love are about as radio-ready as Kings X ever got. But even that track, when listened to in context, works great as a bridge between the harmonically-driving opener We Are Finding Who We Are and the slower, heartfelt I’ll Never Get Tired of You.

The album really gains momentum as it goes on; though the songs have all the Kings X trademarks (low, deep guitars and bass lines with arhythmic patterns, complex vocal harmonizing, a soulful lead singer, introspective lyrics) the band pushes themselves to greater heights both in their playing and songwriting. Tracks like Fine Art of Friendship, I Can’t Help It, and We Were Born To Be Loved sound like the band you’ve come to expect, except with much more complex and mature compositions (I’m talking about the actual notes they’ve composed.) On the other hand, quirky harmonic experiments like Mr. Wilson and iSix Broken Soldiers keep the meal varied while proving the band is no one-trick pony. In this manner, the album manages a roller-coaster like pacing that keeps things moving and balanced for the full hour.

One of the high peaks of said roller-coaster has got to be Moanjam, perhaps the bands most ass-kicking, turn-it-up-to-11 song ever. How it manages to be both tight and loose, I’m not sure, but its 6 minutes of guitar-hero jamming no other band could recreate- the combination of precision and raw power slammed together. After that performance, you’d think there’d be nowhere left to go, but the band keeps the act perfectly balanced, song after song, leading up to the epic title track. At almost ten minutes long, its a ballsy affair, a combination of everything they’ve done before, Minor-key harmonies, syncopated metal riffs, soulful vocals, probing lyrics, its all swirled together here as a capstone to their young career. And then, as an epilogue, Kings X swivels 180 degrees and ends the album with the quiet, acoustic Legal Kill, a song about, you guessed it, abortion. In true Kings X fashion, it is neither pro- or con- anything, but simply a meditation on how difficult it can be to sort out your thoughts and feelings on something so controversial.

To end so humbly, after basically handing the world a fiery masterpiece, is not only genius, but a testament to the true soul of this great band. If they had put out nothing but garbage for the rest of their careers, this album would still grant them passage into heavy metal heaven.

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